Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Conamara Revolution

2014; Philosophy Documentation Center; Volume: 18; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/nhr.2014.0062

1534-5815

Bob Quinn,

Island Studies and Pacific Affairs

Conamara Revolution Bob Quinn On a dark November night in 1970 I finally arrived in Conamara with a wife, a baby, an old VW van, and the reality of life on the dole. Motherhouse RTÉ had been abandoned and I was jobless again. In the year since cutting the RTÉ umbilical chord, I had been a dishwasher in a fancy restaurant in Hampstead, London, cleaning up after the likes of Peter Cook and the duke of Bedford. While there, the BBC offered me a job making documentary films. Such was my arrogance that I wrote a polite answer saying I would rather snag turnips in Mayo than engage with film again. I was going to be a writer! But before I began raking in the royalties, I returned to Ireland, got married, and worked as a trawlerman in Killybegs on a boat called the Donegal that rarely seemed to go out fishing. Either our skipper, Manus Boyle, was ill or the boat needed repairs. In three months, I earned thirty pounds. One day I steered our home—the old Volkswagen van in which we were living—toward the Employment Exchange (otherwise known as the dole of-fice), miles away in Carndonagh. Seeking directions, I explained to a passer-by that I wanted to register for any jobs that might be available. “I don’t think there’s many go there for that,” was his dubious response. He was right, and I returned to the fishing industry. Many years later in Killybegs the honest and by-then retired skipper of the Donegal, Manus Boyle, confessed to me that both he and Scots John, the mechanic, had been irredeemable alcoholics. Hence the continual “repairs” to the boat. (Manus is now, and has been for many years, a teetotaller. His son played on the 1991 Donegal All-Ireland winning team.) It was strange that I should end up in Conamara. Other than these episodes. I was as ignorant of the place as any other east-coast urbanite. My default “nationality” was Dublin. I felt I needed to leave Ireland again, but could think of nowhere amenable to my butterfly propensities. Instead, I became an interior emigré, accompanied by my patient wife and our baby. Physically we emigrated to an tír aneoil, that unknown country, Conamara. The writer Desmond Fennell, who lived in the area, had written to tell me that any man willing to work could survive in Conamara. [End Page 9] He did not mention that there were few jobs in 1970 and that most men were on the dole. When, years before in 1959, I had first visited Conamara on the pillion of a motorbike, I did not even know that the people spoke Irish. All I recall of the trip is going up to a small cottage near Salruck (where Wittgenstein had briefly lived) on a sweltering summer’s day and asking to buy some food and water for a bunch of us improvident youth hostellers swimming on a nearby beach. A handsome woman with two children clinging to her skirts handed me an untouched Gateaux cake and refused to accept payment. That made a memorable impression though I felt a little bad about the kids. The next visit was a decade later when I brought the RTÉ stringer cameraman in Galway, the Breton Yann Guiomard, to shoot scenes for a musical insert in a studio program I was directing. I even remember the song: “Maidin I mBéarra,” otherwise known as “Danny Boy.” It was sung by Gráinne Yeats and acted by a beautiful model named Dolly Sheridan whom I was trying, unsuccessfully, to seduce—her excuse for resisting me was that she had “coward’s legs,” an alibi she admitted getting from Spike Milligan’s novel Puckoon. When we got back to the station and hurriedly began to edit the shots together for a live program the editor called my attention to a donkey in the scene. The brute not only boasted a monstrous head, sickening cry, and ears like errant wings, but also a proud erection. The donkey’s exuberance meant a hasty abbreviation of imagery for the musical item. The day we arrived, an...